Project Description
Technical SEO on Umbraco and systematization of global content
Croisières AML has been sailing on the St. Lawrence since 1972. A family-owned business that has become the largest cruise excursion company in Canada, it operates a fleet of 25 ships in a dozen ports in Quebec and welcomes more than 650,000 passengers per year. This operational reality translates online into a large, seasonal, bilingual site, where the same information can appear in dozens of different places.
The mandate had two inseparable components. The first, technical, aimed to clean up the SEO signals of a site built on Umbraco. The second, structural, consisted of making the content really maintainable by the internal teams, by centralizing everything that changes over the seasons.
The structure of the site as a reflection of the actual offer
The last axis focused on architecture. A visitor looking for a cruise does not think like a database. He searches by city, by experience, by season, sometimes by ship. A dinner cruise in the Old Port is also part of a research logic that our team encounters every day as an SEO agency in Montreal : strong local intent, marked seasonality, direct competition with tourist booking platforms. The site had to be able to respond to these multiple entries without multiplying competing pages on the same queries.
Paths have been clarified, redundant pages have been processed, and the internal linking has been reorganized to direct authority to pages that actually carry transactional intent. The rest supports, without trying to capture.
What SEO optimization on Umbraco entails
Umbraco is a solid, flexible .NET CMS, and very different from the consumer PHP environments on which the majority of sites optimized on a daily basis are based. The levers are not in the same places. No extension to install to set a tag, no global setting accessible in three clicks: each correction goes through document types, templates and rendering logic.
The work began with a complete reading of the content tree and the templates that support it. Rendering tags, managing canonicals, consistency of language correspondences between the French and English versions, processing of URL parameters generated by cruise search filters: these are all points that, on this type of installation, can be corrected at the root rather than on the surface.
Structured data for an offer that changes in nature according to the season
A whale watching cruise from Tadoussac, a dinner cruise in Montreal, a river shuttle, a Zodiac excursion: these are four distinct products, with different booking logics, seasonality and audiences. The engines must be able to distinguish them without hesitation.
The markings have been built to reflect this diversity. Organizational units, products and experiences, starting points, operating periods, base rates: each type of content has been treated in a way that is adapted to what it really is, rather than generic markup applied uniformly. The declaration of places, in particular, deserved special care in view of the number of ports served and the importance of geographically oriented research in tourism.
Metadata and extracts: arbitrating between volume and precision
On a site of this size, metadata poses a problem of scale before posing a problem of writing. Each product page, each starting city page, each category page needs a title of its own, in two languages, in order to be eligible for a good GEO performance, on AIs…
The logic adopted combines differentiated patterns for volume pages and manual rework of pages with high commercial stakes. The excerpts displayed in the results have been subject to the same arbitration: what is displayed must correspond to what is actually available, to the period when the Internet user is searching. An outdated rate or date range in a search result costs more than no information.
Systematizing global ones: the part that changes in the long term
This is the most structuring aspect of the mandate, and the least visible.
On a tourist site, a large part of the content is made up of information that comes up everywhere and that changes regularly. Opening hours, operating periods, departure rates, legal notices, contact details, cancellation conditions, guarantee formulations. When these elements are hard-written into each page, a seasonal update becomes a multi-day work, with guaranteed oversights and inconsistencies that end up in the search results.
These elements have been extracted from the editorial content and centralized in editable globals from the interface. A change made in one place now propagates wherever the information appears, in both languages. The gain is not only operational: it is directly SEO. Signal consistency across a large site is a quality criterion that engines evaluate, and a site where the same information contradicts each other from page to page sends exactly the wrong message.
This approach is in line with the logic that guides our SEO analysis and audit work on high-volume platforms: correcting a symptom is useful, correcting the mechanism that produces it is infinitely more so. This is the reasoning that made it possible to unblock the indexing of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, another institution where the difficulty did not come from one page in particular but from the way the platform produced them all.
A technical basis aligned with a seasonal cycle
The site is now based on a coherent technical architecture, a markup that reflects the reality of the offer, and a global content system that allows the teams to evolve information without touching the code or breaking the signals.
On a tourist site, the real difficulty is not optimizing a page. It’s about holding the optimization through the seasons, fare changes, new beginnings and both languages. Systematization is not a team comfort. This is what prevents SEO work from deteriorating on its own, six months after its delivery, in a logic of SEO strategy designed to last.
